Eric Alterman: When reviewers don't know what they're talking about

In Sunday's NYTBR, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke writes effusively of
journalist Michael Dobbs' new book on the Cuban missile crisis, here.

I'll say this for Dobbs. He is a lucky man.
He gets a front-page
review from a famous man in the most influential space there is. Still, while
Holbrooke is a smart fellow, and as expert as anyone alive on the practice of
international diplomacy, he doesn't know much about the Cuban missile crisis.
The literature on the topic among historians and political scientists is as
vast as on perhaps any eight days in actual -- as opposed to biblical -- human history. It is very nearly a
full-time job to keep up with it. And that is not Holbrooke's job. So
while it's lucky for Dobbs, it's unlucky for people who devote themselves to
the topic.

For instance, Holbrooke writes that"Kennedy had asked that [the missiles in Turkey]
be removed before the missile crisis, but no action had been taken." This
is actually one of the most common myths about the missile crisis, of which
there are many. In fact, my dissertation adviser Barton J. Bernstein demonstrated
that Kennedy only thought he asked for them to be removed, but never actually
did so.

This is the part that really drives me crazy:

Dobbs's research uncovers some juicy nuggets for history buffs. My
favorite is the debunking of the once-famous"back-channel" between
the ABC reporter John Scali and Aleksandr Feklisov, a K.G.B. station chief. The
Kennedy administration attached great importance to this connection, and spent
much time drafting a message for Scali to give to Feklisov. But on the basis of
extensive analysis and interviews, Dobbs believes that the so-called back
channel was a self-generated effort by an ambitious spy to send some
information to his bosses in Moscow, as well as self-promotion by an ambitious
journalist, who parlayed his meetings with the K.G.B. agent into a public
legend that eventually led to his becoming the American ambassador to the United Nations. Dobbs, one
of the most thorough journalists in Washington,
concludes that"there is no evidence" the K.G.B. cable containing
Scali's message"played any role in Kremlin decision-making on the crisis,
or was even read by Khrushchev." He calls it"a classic example of
miscommunication." Nonetheless, Dobbs adds wryly,"the Scali-Feklisov
meeting would become part of the mythology of the Cuban missile crisis.

"One Minute to Midnight" is filled with similar insights
that will change the views of experts and help inform a new generation of
readers."

Sorry,
but this is nonsense. I had this story in When
Presidents Lie, which was published in 2004. I wrote then:

Roger Hilsman's account of the secret discussions between John
Scali and Alexander Fomin -- whose real name was Feklisov -- also turns out to be a blind alley. The talks were never
officially sanctioned on the Soviet side, and Feklisov did not report his
contacts with Scali to KGB headquarters until
after their second meeting. The news of that meeting did not, therefore, arrive until Saturday, October 27, Moscow time, and it was another four hours before the KGB sent the message to Foreign Minister
Gromyko. Khrushchev, hence, would have known nothing
about these contacts until after he
composed both of his letters to Kennedy. Khrushchev's first letter and Feklisov's communication therefore could not have been" clearly related," much less"drafted at the same time,"
as Hilsman claimed. Feklisov even disputes Hilsman's account that he approached
Scali rather than the other way around.93
Their talks no doubt did influence the American team, but only on the basis of a false understanding of the origin of Feklisov's
instructions.

Footnote 93 reads:

Mark J. White, Missiles in Cuba:
Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro and the 1962 Crisis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,1997 130-31. In his oral history,
Scali also related a conversation that he
estimates to have taken place in 1972 with a Soviet official who informed him"those proposals were never relayed to Moscow" because"they were never
considered important." He could not, however, identify
the official in question, as the conversation occurred a decade previous to the oral history interview. See John
Scali Oral History, interviewed by Sheldon Stern, November 17, 1982,
10, JFKL.

So this alleged
historical bombshell has actually been common knowledge to historians who have
kept up with the literature since at least 1997.

I am not casting any
particular aspersions against anyone with this post, but I do find it
personally frustrating. When When Presidents
Lie was published, the Times
BR editors gave it to Gary Hart. This was a respectful and generous assignment.
But like Holbrooke, Hart knows a great deal about diplomacy but very little
about history, and most infuriating, he doesn't know how little he knows. He
thought the book lousy and thought the Cuban missile crisis section to be the
worst part of it.

Back then he indefensibly wrote, here,
that I was accusing JFK of a"failure to disclose what almost everyone in Washington knew."
Well, if"almost
everyone in Washington
knew" about the missile trade,
it was news to me, and I studied the damn thing for 11 years. I responded in a letter to the Times, here,
in which I pointed out:

If true, this
would be big news to, among others, Robert Kennedy, who was so concerned that
word of the deal would leak out that when Khrushchev and the Soviets attempted
to codify the bargain through a secret memorandum of understanding, he refused
to accept it, citing the potential damage it might one day do to his own
political ambitions. It would also surprise the historian and Kennedy adviser
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who noted, ''Probably no one except the Kennedys,
McNamara, Rusk, Ball and Bundy knew what R.F.K. had told Dobrynin'' (the Soviet
ambassador). Finally, if ''almost everyone'' knew about the deal, as Hart
claims, why -- as late as January 1989 -- did Anatoly Dobrynin demand that a
group of American participants in the crisis, gathered in Moscow for a post-mortem, finally own up to
it? Why did Ted Sorensen respond with what he called ''a confession to make to
my colleagues on the American side, as well as to others who are present,''
that he had edited Robert Kennedy's diaries that formed the basis of the book ''Thirteen
Days'' to prevent the disclosure of the deal, which ''was still a secret even
on the American side, except for the six of us who had been present at that
meeting''?

Hart's evidenceless assertion is also
contradicted by Holbrooke's impression, for whatever that is worth. He writes,"Kennedy was
more than willing to dismantle them, but he was determined not to leave a
public impression that he had made any sort of deal or 'trade' with Moscow. Asked by Dobrynin about the Jupiters,
Bobby Kennedy said they were not an 'insurmountable
obstacle' but
that they could not be linked --
ever -- to the
withdrawal of the Soviet missiles. Bobby Kennedy also said that there would
have to be a time lag of several months before their removal. It was this 'non-deal deal' that opened the door
for a resolution. In 'Thirteen
Days,' his
posthumously published chronicle of the crisis, Bobby Kennedy carefully edited
his account of the Dobrynin meeting to remove any hint of a deal on Turkey. But
almost from the beginning, many people suspected the truth, and looking back on
it today, it may seem surprising to see how hard the Kennedys sought to conceal
it."

I have a number of other issues with both
reviews, but the upshot of this episode is that Dobbs got lucky with the
generous but-ill-informed Richard Holbrooke, and I got screwed by an
ungenerous-but-ignorant Gary Hart. Book reviews are by definition a crapshoot, and a deeply unfair one at
that. Serious writers spend years, if not decades, writing books, and the people who review them are free to
misrepresent them to far more people than will ever see the book. And while
editors try to be conscientious, even the best must admit there is very little
way to ensure that a reviewer is fair to a book. In both Hart's and Holbrooke's cases, they should have stuck to what they knew,
which is plenty, instead of pretending to know what they didn't. But my overall
point is that reviewers ought to be a great deal more respectful of the
difficult process of writing a book in the first place. Serious books, like
newspapers, are disappearing in our public culture just when we need them the
most.